ther porter in the world, and saturated, even to the braid on his
livery, with the same melancholy charm that I had felt to be latent in
the name of Gilberte, looked at me as though he knew that I was one
of those whose natural unworthiness would for ever prevent them from
penetrating into the mysteries of the life inside, which it was his duty
to guard, and over which the ground-floor windows appeared conscious of
being protectingly closed, with far less resemblance, between the nobly
sweeping arches of their muslin curtains, to any other windows in the
world than to Gilberte's glancing eyes. On other days we would go along
the boulevards, and I would post myself at the corner of the Rue Duphot;
I had heard that Swann was often to be seen passing there, on his way
to the dentist's; and my imagination so far differentiated Gilberte's
father from the rest of humanity, his presence in the midst of a crowd
of real people introduced among them so miraculous an element, that even
before we reached the Madeleine I would be trembling with emotion at
the thought that I was approaching a street from which that supernatural
apparition might at any moment burst upon me unawares.

But most often of all, on days when I was not to see Gilberte, as I
had heard that Mme. Swann walked almost every day along the Allee des
Acacias, round the big lake, and in the Allee de la Reine Marguerite, I
would guide Francoise in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. It was
to me like one of those zoological gardens in which one sees assembled
together a variety of flora, and contrasted effects in landscape; where
from a hill one passes to a grotto, a meadow, rocks, a stream, a trench,
another hill, a marsh, but knows that they are there only to enable
the hippopotamus, zebra, crocodile, rabbit, bear and heron to disport
themselves in a natural or a picturesque setting; this, the Bois,
equally complex, uniting a multitude of little worlds, distinct and
separate--placing a stage set with red trees, American oaks, like an
experimental forest in Virginia, next to a fir-wood by the edge of the
lake, or to a forest grove from which would suddenly emerge, in her
lissom covering of furs, with the large, appealing eyes of a dumb
animal, a hastening walker--was the Garden of Woman; and like the
myrtle-alley in the Aeneid, planted for their delight with trees of one
kind only, the Allee des Acacias was thronged by the famous Beauties
of the day. As, from a lon